When working in your project management tools becomes more work than the actual project itself, you know you’re in trouble.
Work confidently with a powerful project management tool that makes getting started and managing projects both simple and easy. Take the pain out of painstaking projects Even complex projects are easier to manage when you can choose methods and tools that best suit your needs.
Modern businesses live and die by their ability to zoom out to 30,000 ft to get the big picture and then come back down to solid ground and put in the work. Especially for technical teams, where one small misstep can bring the whole thing down, the ability to keep on track with your projects and know what to do next is essential.
Are you just here to see the big list of 9 best project management tools? Here we go:
Use a powerful, yet simple project management tool to plan, manage, and deliver work effortlessly—from one-time projects to large initiatives. Simplify planning and reduce training time with help from familiar scheduling features for project managers like Timeline view (Gantt chart). Personal projects can be smoothly managed with this online collaboration and project management tool. Important events like birthdays and anniversaries can be effectively planned and conducted as.
(Any of the links above will lead to the company's whole story.)
As consultant and author Jim Rohn put it “Either you run the day, or the day runs you.” And without the right tools in place, it feels like the day’s running you over with a steamroller.
So, how do we give ourselves the seemingly superhuman ability to see all parts of a project at once and make the right calls at the right time? Enter, the almighty project management tool.
The right project management tool lets you organize your team to do their best work. It lets you plan sprints or tasks and track who’s doing what to make sure you’re working in the most efficient way possible. In short, it let’s you keep your head above water no matter how high the waves are coming crashing in.
But it’s not simply enough to just pick your tool and go off running. The right project management tool for your team is only right because it works for your team. Regardless of all the options out there, whatever you choose needs to have specific features that work for you.
Never Miss Another Deadline. Try Planio.Let’s take a look at some of the most popular tools that are actually being used by top teams around the globe and then dive into the more important part: why they use them.
9 Top Tech Teams and the Project Management Tools They Use
To stand out in the modern business world, you need to be unique and exciting. But the way you run your business certainly doesn’t need to be. That’s not to say that we should all run out and copy what Apple, Facebook, or Amazon do—but rather that there’s no shame in taking inspiration from how the greats plow through massive projects and stay on deadline and on budget.
“Businesses should follow and learn from others’ successes and failures in order to better understand and predict their own,” wrote Ben Mezrich in The Accidental Billionaires—the book of Facebook’s origin that was later adapted into The Social Network.
So, let’s start by looking at some of the biggest names out there today and what tools they’re using to keep their teams on track.
1. Uber
How do you keep track of millions of drivers across the globe, build the best tools for them, and manage the day-to-day operations of a $69 billion company? For the technical team at Uber, that all comes down to Asana—a project management tool founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
With Asana, you get your basic project management needs done in a clean and clear way. The web-based tool lets each of your teams create its own individual workspaces and then fill them with ongoing projects and tasks. Each task is tracked and users are notified of updates and changes that affect them with the ultimate goal of making sure every task has a clear next step ready.
Personal Project Management Software
The project management tool that developers and managers love.
While Asana is a very capable all-around project management tool, it has particular emphasis on tracking everything from projects to hiring to bugs in the code, which is why you’ll see it also being used by teams at fellow billion-dollar companies like AirBnB and Pinterest.
2. CNET
With over 200 million monthly readers across the globe, CNET is the highest-read technology new source on the web. Founded in 1994, CNET quickly grew from a handful of tech-themed TV shows into an online empire of review sites, blogs, videos, and podcasts and was acquired by CBS in the late-2000s for a multi-billion dollar deal.
Any major media network needs a serious project management tool to keep them running. And for CNET this is Planio—an extremely flexible project management tool built on top of the Redmine open source project and optimized for technical teams with integrated Git and SVN repositories, additional security, team chat, and help desk.
“I need to make sure our projects are moving forward, and Planio’s roadmap view gives me an at-a-glance update,” explains CNET Content Solution’s Senior Solutions Consultant Luis Ferrao. “Everything our team does is now done in Planio. It’s our main workflow tool. At this stage, we’ve created tens of thousands of issues.”
3. Dribbble
The original online show-and-tell platform for the design community, Dribbble now hosts close to half a million design portfolios and has become one of the biggest sources of leads and contacts for freelance designers. To service a community as picky as designers, Dribbble uses Flow to keep their projects in order.
Manage Projects like the Pros. Try Planio.Flow is specifically designed to be simple and quick and describe their product as “a happy middle ground between what you’re doing right now, and an expensive enterprise project management system.” It’s very UX and design-focused, making it a perfect partner for Dribbble.
“I wanted a tool that did product management well (for my use with our CEO), but more importantly, one that would make the day to day work for individual team members really straight forward,” explains Dribbble’s Director of Product, Sarah Kuehnle.
“Flow does the latter really well right now and are making the product management/roadmap side better every day. I also love that it looks great as I have my eyes on this thing all day long.”
4. Dropbox
With over half a billion users, the technical team at Dropbox needs to do everything in their power to keep the service up and running. Their choice? Dropbox Paper.
Corelcad 2016 16 0 0 – reasonably priced cad solution. Paper was (as the name implies) built as an in-house solution to help the company’s project managers capture, organize, and prioritize issues, plan sprints, and get real-time reporting on the work being done. And while not the most flexible project management system, it allows them to work quickly and keep all their docs, files, and images in a central location.
“We needed a way to quickly convey our ideas with words, images, code, and references to other documents and software tools,” explains Dropbox product manager, DJ Chung. “Paper allows us to do that natively. It also integrates with other tools we use everyday like Slack, InVision, and Trello, and also allows our teams to stay on top of project decisions and tasks through a built-in task management feature that allows you to assign people and due dates to important tasks.”
Project management software everyone on your team will love.
5. Kickstarter
From the projects being completed and launched on Kickstarter to the community of thousands of backers, the world’s biggest crowdfunding platform puts an obvious emphasis on collaboration. To keep their own teams on track, however, multiple groups within Kickstarter use Trello—a Kanban-style project management tool that lets you create board and cards to track the progress of your projects and teams.
![Personal project planner Personal project planner](https://project-management.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/smartsheet-mac-pm-tool-300x241.png)
Unlike more robust project management options, Trello is more visually based and focuses on clarity, making it easy to quickly see who’s working on what and understand where any part of the project is in the pipeline. Each project or team is assigned a ‘board’ in Trello, which you can then fill with vertical lists full of cards. As projects progress through their development, each card is moved to the next list.
So for example, if I were using Trello to track my progress on this blog post, I might have lists for “Ideas”, “Researching,” “Writing,” and “Published” so that I know where I’m at and what needs to be worked on. Trello is great for visually keeping track of your projects and a favourite of Silicon Valley, with companies like Medium, Buffer, and ProductHunt also using it to run their projects.
6. Ghostery
Ghostery is on a mission to make browsing the web suck a little bit less. The company’s free browser plug-in detects and blocks tracking technologies on the websites you visit to speed up page loads, eliminate clutter, and protect your data and privacy. To keep their product up-to-date with the ever-changing web, Ghostery primarily uses Roadmunk and Jira.
Fall in ♥ with Project Management. Try Planio.Roadmunk is a web app that makes it easy to create visual roadmaps and Gannt charts, while Jira is a feature-rich Agile project management tool built by Atlassian.
“We use Roadmunk to create our product roadmaps, which are essentially broad stroke product strategy plans that extend 6-12 months into the future,” explains Jeremy Tillman, Ghostery’s director of product management.
When it comes to their day-to-day project management, however, they turn to Jira.
“In particularly, we use Jira to create and manage our product tickets, which can be anything from a new feature, product improvement improvement, bug fix, or task,” explains Tillman, who adds that, while they chose Jira for its comprehensive features, “it can be a heavy tool whose heft and somewhat steep learning curve might be a poor fit for smaller teams.”
7. WeWork
WeWork’s massive $20 billion valuation hinges on their ability to bring progressive, data-focused insights into the classical (and, let’s be honest, boring) world of rental office space. To do that, they need a project management tool that gives them a high-level overview of every project across their many different teams, to see how they all work together. Their choice? Jira.
Jira is a feature-rich Agile project management tool built by Atlassian. The focus is on clarity and collaboration, and while you can get granular into each task, the big benefit is a broader view of the progress of your project.
“We have a lot of needs from a project management tool—assigning tickets to team members, categorizing by type and tagging with priority, setting statuses, and on and on,” explains WeWork software engineer Alex Choi. “After trying multiple options, we went with Jira. Not because we love it, but because it does everything we need.”
8. Groupon
Despite its slow decline over the past few years, Groupon—the daily deal site—was once one of the industry’s fastest growing companies, hitting a $1 billion valuation in just 16 months from launch. Today, you can find thousands of discounted offers from local companies, manufacturers, and getaways on Groupon, with billions in sales being processed on the site every year.
For managing this level and volume of growth, Groupon uses a number of different project management tools to stay organized, including Basecamp. Basecamp was one of the first project management software solutions released and has been helping teams for over 10 years. While not necessarily optimized for technical teams, Basecamp does give you a quick view of what you’re working on by splitting your communication and project tracking up into an HQ (main overview), Teams, and finally projects. Basecamp boasts thousands of users including companies like 9GAG and Harvest.
9. Netflix
As one of the world’s largest content platforms and producers, it’s safe to say Netflix has more than a few projects on the go at once that they need to keep track of. From commissioning and producing billions of dollars worth of original content, to maintaining streaming services for close to 100 million users in pretty much every country in the world, the teams at Netflix have their hands full when it comes to project management.
For their technical teams, they chose Confluence—a project management and team collaboration tool built by software makers Atlassian. Confluence is aimed at Enterprise companies and built around adding transparency to your team. It allows you to create documents as a team, provide feedback in context and iterate until the work is finished.
Get Everyone on the Same Page. With Planio.How the top technical teams use their project management tools: 7 Must-Have Features
Well, there you have it.
Nine top tools from 9 of the best technical teams in the world. Reading through that list, however, you might have started to see a pattern.
Project management as a practice has been developed for years. And all these tools are a natural progression of the time-tested techniques of past managers. Talk to anyone who builds digital products and they’ll tell you the same thing: Tools are just tools. It’s what you do with them that matters.
That’s why what project management tools the top teams use is only a small part of the equation. To truly benefit from a project management system you need to not only know what to use, but how to use it.
As Dribbble’s Director of Product Sarah Kuehnle, explains “I care most about the impact of a tool on my team. I’m happy to use pretty much anything provided it keeps my team productive and happy.”
So, let’s take a look at the top project management tool features that all of these teams require, and how you can use them at your own company.
![Personal Project Management Tool Personal Project Management Tool](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a6/d6/e4/a6d6e439d868776bae373e940139dd61.jpg)
1. Scalable task management that works whether you’re building an app, website, or product
Proper project management starts with knowing and being able to see what everyone’s working on at once so you can fit the pieces together as your project progresses. To get that all-important bird's-eye view, you need a tool with task management that’s organized, highly configurable, and can scale as your company and your projects expand.
Here’s a few features you should look out for in any tool:
- Flexibility in how you configure and assign tasks including setting deadlines, priority, and tagging teammates
- Control over who can work on what tasks through role-based permissions
- Clear workflows defined by roles and projects to make sure the right people know what to do and are able to do their work
2. Flexible planning for both Agile and Traditional project management
Your tool also shouldn’t limit the way you manage projects. Whether you’re doing Agile development with Scrum and Kanban, or sequential planning using a more traditional waterfall model and Gantt charts, your software shouldn’t dictate how you work.
Look for a tool that gives you a quick way to design and track sprints (or tasks that you’ll be completing in sequence), as well as a visual way to see the progress of your project, like a Kanban-style board.
3. Clear and transparent milestones to track progress
When famous management consultant Peter Drucker said “What gets measured, gets improved”, he might as well have been talking about the future of project management software. To make sure you’re improving and growing, you need to have a clear view of the project milestones you’ve hit and the ability to track issues so you can correct course before you’ve gone too far.
Look for tools that allow you to build out a larger ‘roadmap’ of your project and track key milestones. This way you can keep track of tasks within the larger context of your project and ensure that what you’re working on now is contributing to the greater good.
Finish Projects on Time and Budget. With Planio.4. Team chat and communication tools that keep the collaboration where the work is happening
Communication is at the core of collaboration and running a smooth project. But context switching and hopping back and forth between different apps can slow things down, or confuse the situation. While not every project management tool offers good communication options, the ones that do give you an added bonus of keeping all relevant conversations in the right place.
And don’t look simply for real-time chat. Setting up knowledge forums or posting ‘blog posts’ to your team’s project is a great way to update everyone without disrupting their workflow.
5. Everything where it should be with easy access to docs and files
“Where’s the strategy doc again?”
“Can you send me the photo we’re using on the landing page one more time?”
My desktop and Downloads folder is already a scary enough place as it is to have to go hunting for critical documents and files when I need them.
Instead, look for a tool that allows you to upload and store files where they’re needed, whether that’s attached to a task, project, issue, or blog post. And once they’re up, make sure your tool syncs across all your teammates and devices to ensure you always have access to what you need, when you need it.
6. Developer-friendly integrations
You might have noticed in the above section that certain tools were more geared towards your technical team, while others are better for design, content, or product roadmaps.
While there’s an argument to be made that these should be kept separate, when they are, it’s easy for things to get missed or information to be misconstrued. To maintain transparency across all your teams, find a tool that caters to everyone, from developers to marketers, so everyone involved in the project can stay in the loop and know what’s going on.
And to make your project management environment more developer friendly, look for tools with tight integrations with hosted Git and Subversion repositories, as well as role permissions to limit access to only those who know what they’re working with.
7. Tight progress feedback loops and forecasting with time tracking
A big part of successful project management is reporting on what’s been done. This means knowing what stage your project is at, how long tasks have taken, and whether you’re on track to hit your milestones on time and on budget.
Look for tools that not only offer accurate time tracking, but let you make sense of that time by viewing it over specific periods and mapping it against your estimates. This is also an essential feature if you’re going to be billing clients by the hour, or want to be able to show them how much work has been done.
BONUS: Powerful search to stay organized when projects get out of hand
With all these features and all your team working together in one place, things are bound to get lost or misplaced. That’s why it’s also absolutely essential that your project management tool offers some form of detailed search to track down those missing files or find that comment on the issue you’re trying to fix.
The larger your projects get, the more advanced your search needs to be as well. Look for tools that give you options for limiting searches to projects, dates, location, etc…
The faster you can find what you need, the faster you can get back to building.
Final thoughts on the best project management tools
It’s not just about which project management tool you use, but how you use it.
Never Miss Another Deadline. Try Planio.The tool that’s right for you has the features that work with your workflow, integrates with the rest of your stack, and gives feedback on the progress of your project so you can steer the ship in the right direction.
While we can all learn from what the greats use, choosing a powerful project management tool eventually just comes down to the specific features that work for your company. If you’re considering a switch or looking for something new, have a look at the features listed above and make sure whatever tool you choose can tick all the boxes.
If you’re looking for a project management tool that ticks all the boxes, check out Planio. You can even get started for free for 30 days to see if Planio is right for your team.
There is a list of 8 useful project management tools that project managers should know, including Gantt Chart, PERT chart, WBS diagram, calendar, timeline, status table, HOQ, and mind map. Learn the advantages of each tool and know how it works.
Project management involves effective plans and systematic work assignments. It includes determining the project objectives, making schedules, and assigning tasks to ensure that your team can accomplish a goal. Many tools make project management more effective and efficient. Here we will introduce the commonly used ones that are incredibly useful for visualizing your project. More importantly, all these diagrams can be made in EdrawMax, an all-in-one diagramming tool, which provides professionally designed symbols and multiple easy-to-customize templates. So you can create a diagram like a Gantt chart or WBS diagram with minimal effort.
Project Management Tool - Gantt Chart
A Gantt chart can help manage projects by breaking a large project into a series of smaller tasks in an organized way. Each task has an expected time duration, presented by a horizontal bar whose left end indicates the beginning date of the task and whose right end indicates the completion date of the task. Tasks may run sequentially, in parallel or overlapping. During the process, significant events can be highlighted as 'Milestones,' marked by small diamond shapes.
You can recognize what the sub-tasks are and when each task begins and ends from a Cantt chart. Presenting a visual overview of the project, you can easily track the progress by seeing what should be happening at any stage in the project.
Project Management Tool - PERT Chart
The PERT stands for 'project evaluation and review technique.' It's a primary project management tool for planning and scheduling entire projects and tracking the implementation phase. PERT charts can also show task division, time allocation, and starting and ending dates. Unlike the Gantt chart, which uses bars to represent tasks, the PERT chart displays information as a network model that uses boxes to represent tasks and arrows to present dependencies between tasks. The layout of a PERT chart makes the relationships between activities easier to see than with Gantt charts. But the disadvantage is it can be challenging to follow when there are many complex dependencies and tasks.
Project Management Tool - Calendar
The Calendar is the date or time-based project management tool, which is the easiest to understand. It is more suitable for personal time management better to manage your daily, weekly, or monthly schedules. The outstanding part of this tool is that it has more space for adding to-do lists. It will remind you what to do every day and make sure things can be finished before the deadline.
Project Management Tool - Timeline
The Timeline is also a visual project management tool to help track project progress. With a timeline, you can clearly visualize by what time a task needs to be done. It is a more sequential way of looking at tasks over time. However, the timeline is not as popular as the Gantt chart since it has limitations in showing task dependencies and the completion state.
Source: lucidchart
Project Management Tool - WBS Diagram
The WBS, also known as Work Breakdown Structure, is a common project management tool that helps visualize the scope of work by breaking a project into individual components that can be effectively scheduled. The WBS is a tree-style structure with the overall task on the top, followed by project sections and further into individual tasks. WBS examples are similar to a flowchart that has its components linked logically. The components may be explained in the text or the boxes.
Project Management Tool - Mind Map
The mind map is also a powerful tool to manage your projects. Unlike other project management tools, the mind map is less formal, yet more flexible. You can use it to break the whole complex project into smaller tasks that are easy to manage to-do lists and analyze problems. With a mind map, you can insert pictures, link files, and drill down to focus on a specific part, which other tools couldn't do.
Project Management Tool - Status Table
The Status table is an effective tool that is used to track project progress. It doesn't contain too much detail of the project duration and task relations, but with more focus on the status and complete progress. A great function of the status table is that it can include people who take charge of the task, so that project leaders can better evaluate employee performance and know who to reach when there is a problem.
Project Management Tool - HOQ
HOQ, representing the house of quality, is a quality management tool used to define the relationship between customer desires and product capabilities. It's a tool used in QFD (Quality function deployment) to facilitate group decision-making. Though it looks complicated, it's easy to create through Edraw. All the components in the HOQ, like the roof, matrix, legend box, and markers, are already included in EdrawMax. You can create a high-quality HOQ diagram without much effort.
EdrawMax: a swiss knife for all your diagramming need
- Effortlessly create over 280 types of diagrams.
- Provide various templates & symbols to match your needs.
- Drag and drop interface and easy to use.
- Customize every detail by using smart and dynamic toolkits.
- Compatible with a variety of file formats, such as MS Office, Visio, PDF, etc.
- Feel free to export, print, and share your diagrams.